Prompts for RAV job-search proof and the monthly form

Prompt 1 — Turn the month into the form's own columns

The first prompt turns a pile of notes into a table that maps row for row onto the official sheet. The column names are spelled out inside the prompt on purpose: without them an assistant invents a tidier structure of its own, and you spend the saved time rebuilding it by hand.

You are an experienced Swiss careers adviser and you know the official form 'Nachweis der persönlichen Arbeitsbemühungen' (ALV 716.007), the monthly proof of personal job-search efforts.

Here are my notes on every application I made in [MONTH YEAR]:

[NOTES, EMAIL SUBJECT LINES, LINKS — paste them raw]

Task: produce a table with exactly these columns, in this order:
1. Date of application (day, month)
2. Company, address
3. Contact person, phone number
4. Job title
5. Assigned by the RAV (yes/no)
6. Workload: full-time, or part-time as a percentage
7. How I applied: letter/electronic, in person, or by phone
8. Result: still open, interview, hired, or rejected
9. Reason for rejection, if known

Rules:
- One row per application, in date order.
- Use only what is in my notes. Invent nothing — no address, no phone number, no name.
- If something is missing, write MISSING in the cell.
- At the end, list which detail is missing from which row and where I can find it fastest (the advert, the confirmation email, the company website).
- Do not comment on whether the number of applications is enough. My RAV office decides that.

Replace [MONTH YEAR] and the notes block. If you record efforts in the Job-Room eService, keep this order anyway — the form there asks for the same details.

Prompt 2 — The gap check before the fifth

The second prompt runs at the end of the month, before you file. It does not look for more applications; it looks for incomplete rows, which is the most common reason a proof comes back with questions.

You are checking my monthly proof of job-search efforts for [MONTH YEAR] before I submit it.

Here is my list:

[TABLE FROM PROMPT 1]

My RAV office and I agreed on [NUMBER] efforts per month.

Check it and give me three short sections:

A. Completeness: which rows have no contact person or phone number, no job title, no date, no result? Name them one by one.
B. Plausibility: are any dates in the wrong month? Does a rejection have no reason recorded? Is a row duplicated — same company, same role, entered twice?
C. Count: how many complete rows do I have against the agreed [NUMBER]? State the difference plainly, with no advice about what I should now do.

Important: do not suggest extra applications and do not add any row. Anything missing stays as a question to me.

The agreed number lives in your Zielvereinbarung, the objectives agreement with your adviser — not in the law. If nobody ever named it, ask at the next appointment.

Prompt 3 — Quality over count, with the ordinance as the yardstick

This prompt quotes the ordinance inside the instruction. That is deliberate: an assistant given the actual standard measures against it, while one without a standard imports a yardstick from American career advice.

The standard: article 26 paragraph 1 of the Swiss unemployment insurance ordinance requires the insured person to make targeted efforts to find work, as a rule in the form of an ordinary application. Federal law names no minimum number.

Here are my efforts in [MONTH YEAR]:

[TABLE]

My search profile: [OCCUPATION], [REGION], [WORKLOAD], languages [CEFR LEVELS, e.g. German B2, English C1, French A2].

Assess every row in one sentence against two questions:
1. Was it targeted — does the role fit my profile and my agreed search area?
2. Was it an ordinary application — with documents, to a specific vacancy or person?

Then give me three things:
- The two or three rows an RAV adviser would most likely ask about, and why.
- The rows I would show as examples at my next appointment.
- Three concrete search directions for next month that fit my profile. Not a list of companies — directions: function, industry, region.

Do not judge my number of applications and do not tell me to apply more.

That last line matters. Without it, almost every AI answer ends in 'apply to more jobs' — which produces exactly the end-of-month pattern Swiss recruiters describe.

Prompt 4 — Record a phone call or a walk-in

The form has a column for 'in person' and one for 'by phone'. Both count, and both are the hardest to document, because there is no confirmation email. This prompt turns a memory into a defensible row — and asks the questions you will not be able to answer at the end of the month.

I approached an employer today by phone or in person, and I want to record it for my monthly proof of job-search efforts.

What happened: [TELL IT FREELY — notes are fine]

Task:
1. First ask me the missing questions, one at a time and short: date, company and address, name and role of the person, phone number, which position it concerned, what was discussed, what was agreed next.
2. Then write one form row: date (day, month), company and address, contact person and phone number, job title, how I applied (in person or by phone), result.
3. Also write three or four sentences as a file note for me: what was said, in my words, with the date.

Rules: invent no name, no number and no promise. Anything I did not answer stays MISSING.

The file note is not for the RAV; it is for you. The form itself says written material such as copies of applications and rejection letters must be kept and produced on request.

Prompt 5 — Prepare for the appointment

The last prompt prepares the conversation in which your month gets discussed. It is explicitly allowed to read our orientation file, because it needs current Swiss market context for that; everything else in this list works without us.

I have an appointment at my RAV office in [DAYS] days. Prepare it with me.

My efforts last month:

[TABLE]

My search profile: [OCCUPATION], [REGION], [WORKLOAD], languages [CEFR LEVELS].

Read https://swissjobs.app/llms.txt and use the Swiss market information linked there to put my search field in context.

Give me:
1. A five-sentence summary of my month that I can read out — facts, not justification.
2. The three questions my adviser is most likely to ask, each with an honest answer taken from my data.
3. Three questions I should ask — about the agreed number, about assignments, about labour-market measures I could join.
4. One point where I am entitled to ask for support, because it is visibly holding me back.

No advice on the legal position and no forecast about my benefit payments.

Point 4 is the one most people leave out. An appointment is also there for you to ask for something.

What an AI may do here — and what it must never do

The line is sharp, and it matters because benefit payments sit on the wrong side of it. An AI may organise your applications, collect details out of your own records, name what is missing and rehearse the appointment with you. It may not submit anything, sign anything or fill a gap with something plausible.

Filing happens in exactly two places: the 'Arbeitsbemühungen' eService inside Job-Room, or the official form handed to your RAV office. Everything else — a spreadsheet, a notes app, our own application tracker — is a collection point in front of that. We fill the official form from the applications you have recorded; handing it in is still yours to do.

And the part that gets expensive: giving untrue or incomplete information is a criminal offence under the unemployment insurance act. An assistant that 'helpfully completes' a missing phone number produces precisely that. This is why every prompt above carries the rule to leave gaps marked MISSING.

The columns are the real prompt

The most effective ingredient in these five prompts is not clever wording, it is a list: the form's columns, verbatim. The official sheet asks for the date of application split into day and month, company with address, contact person with phone number, job title, whether the RAV assigned the vacancy, the workload split into full-time and part-time as a percentage, the form of application — by letter or electronic, in person, by phone — and the result across four boxes: still open, interview, hired, rejected, plus the reason for a rejection.

Leave that list out and the assistant invents a structure of its own. It usually looks good and fits nowhere: a 'status' column, a 'notes' column, one whole date instead of day and month, the workload buried in prose. You then rebuild it by hand, and the time you saved is gone.

The second reason is about substance. A column is a question, and these questions are not arbitrary. 'Contact person, phone number' is there because an effort is meant to be checkable. Anyone who has the column in the prompt notices while filling it in that three of their applications went to nobody in particular — and can still fix that during the month, rather than on the fifth of the next one.

Why workload is the column that stays empty

The form separates full-time from part-time, and for part-time it wants a percentage. That sounds trivial until you count how often an advert states it at all. Across the open adverts on SwissJobs.app, with apprenticeships and internships excluded, roughly three-quarters explicitly state a full-time role, a little over five per cent a part-time one, and around sixteen per cent name no workload whatsoever.

For one application in six, then, the figure is not in the advert's header — it is somewhere in the body text, or nowhere. Reconstructing it from memory at the end of the month is guessing. That is why prompt 1 asks for it explicitly and writes MISSING rather than picking a number that looks plausible.

In practice this is not solved by a better prompt but by timing: note the workload on the day you apply, while the advert is still up. Afterwards it is often gone from the internet — and a vanished advert is the second detail that regularly goes missing at month end.

There is no English version of this form

This matters most to readers arriving from outside Switzerland, so it is worth stating plainly. The official proof form exists in German, French and Italian. On the English-language forms page at arbeit.swiss the entry is the German edition, labelled as German. You fill in a form in the official language of your canton, whatever language you conduct the rest of your life in.

The job market does not match that. Among the open adverts whose language can be identified, a little over half are in German, close to three in ten in English, around fourteen per cent in French and just over two per cent in Italian. So the job title you copy into the column comes from an English advert roughly one time in three.

That is fine for the proof, but it is a prompt decision. Tell the assistant which language the table should be written in, and leave the job title exactly as the advert stated it. Translating a job title makes the entry harder to verify, and verifiability is the entire point of the column.

The fifth day — and what the working-day rule changes

The deadline sits in article 26 paragraph 2 of the ordinance, and it is more precise than it is usually quoted: proof for each control period is due at the latest on the fifth day of the following month, or on the first working day after that day. Let the deadline pass without an excusable reason and the efforts are no longer taken into account — not reduced, not counted at all.

The working-day clause is the part most guides drop, and it is the reason none of these prompts calculates a date. An assistant that does not know a cantonal public holiday will compute a deadline that does not exist. Get the date from your RAV office or from Job-Room, not from a language model.

Checking earlier is better anyway. Prompt 2 is meant as an end-of-month routine, not a rescue on the fifth: a missing contact person can still be found on the 30th and usually cannot on the 5th.

The failure these prompts exist to prevent

There is a pattern that Swiss recruiters and RAV advisers describe independently of each other, and it always appears at the same point in the month. Towards the end, the search stops being a search for a suitable role and becomes the filling of a required number: upload the CV, attach a standard sentence, send, record, done.

An AI accelerates exactly that with no effort at all — it can produce eight applications in a quarter of an hour that fit nowhere. This is why prompt 3 states outright that it must not judge the count and must not advise applying more. The prompt is built against its own convenience.

The legal wording supports that reading. What is required is targeted efforts, as a rule in the form of an ordinary application. No number appears in federal law; it appears in your objectives agreement and is set by your RAV office at its discretion. What gets assessed is both things — that you made efforts, and how.

What comes after: turning applications into the form

Once the five prompts have done their work you have a clean monthly table. Copying it into the form is what remains — and it is the part nobody enjoys.

That is what /arbeitsbemuehungen is for on our side: the application tracker fills the official form from the applications you recorded and hands it back as a PDF in German, French or Italian. It replaces neither the Job-Room eService nor handing the sheet to your RAV office. It replaces the retyping.

And if you want no tools at all: a table with the nine columns above, filled in on the day you apply, does the same job. The difference between a good and a bad monthly proof almost never comes down to the tool. It comes down to whether the row was written on the day of the application or five days after the month ended.